Tutoring
StatHelpers is proud to offer tutoring and teaching services in statistics to students of all ages and educational levels. Whether you are a high school student taking your first course or a doctoral student getting ready for dissertation, we can help you.
Tutoring or Teaching?
The difference between tutoring and teaching is not substantial, but understanding this difference will help us better adjust our services.
Tutoring typically occurs when you are already enrolled in an actual statistics course at your school. With tutoring, we work within the framework set by your instructor to help you better understand the concepts addressed by the course.
Teaching constitutes a smaller proportion of our business, but it is an area we particularly enjoy. Students who are not currently enrolled in a statistics course but have a desire to learn the subject on a one-on-one or small group basis have hired us as private teachers.
How StatHelpers Tutoring Works
We fully believe in a student-guided tutoring process—with some added direction from us when necessary. We know that all students learn differently and will tailor our lessons to work best with your learning style.
It is your position to come to us and say, for example, "I'm struggling with hypothesis testing," but if we begin a discussion of the topic and find that you are lacking in the background knowledge necessary to appropriately understand the topic, we will suggest moving back to the prior topic for a short lesson. We understand that mathematics is a building-block process of knowledge and will strive to detect and rectify any missing gaps.
Having taken many, many statistics courses ourselves, we will readily admit that typical courses can be kind of…dry. Therefore, our style is discussion-based rather than lecture-based. Statistics works much better as a conversation than as a speech. Trust us.
Every professor may have different ways in which they would like to see certain problems solved. We request that you bring with you to meetings any handouts, practice problems, etc. that are applicable to the current lesson so we can work within those preferences. There are many instances where there is more than one approach to a topic, and while we will take some liberties in teaching you the method you will best understand, we prefer not to deviate too far from your professor's choices.
How StatHelpers Teaching Works
Many of the same approaches apply to our teaching services as they do to tutoring. In the case of teaching, we do not expect you to arrive with lesson plans or materials as a framework. However, we would prefer that we begin the course with a mutually understood idea of what you would like to learn. We are extremely flexible in material, but a discussion of goals at the beginning of the course allows us to gather appropriate materials.
In the teaching setup, we expect you to take your own notes but will provide you with reference handouts and practice problems applicable to the lessons planned for the session. We expect you to return to your next session having completed the practice problems so we can discuss the results together.
Our goal in the teaching situation is to provide a casual, comfortable learning environment to learn statistical concepts for enrichment purposes without the pressures of a traditional "graded" school situation.
If you would like to find out more about how we can help you improve your performance in a statistics course or independently teach you statistics, please contact StatHelpers today!